Hello to all,

I'm a german sim freak. I collect sims since I was 15 years old, back in 1985.

Bought all I could get and wanted to make a homepit too. But for a long time I

had no more time to deal with my hobby, cause of my freelance work and the

family. So collecting was the only fun I had in those years. Bought sims just to

put them in the shelf ;-)

Now after all these years I wan't to bring my hobby back to life. Like many of

you, I thought alot about how I could get those old sims running on a new system.

I have teseted everthing, couse I really have a lot of hardware. From old boards

with Pentium MMX to Slot A and 1 over several Socket 462 to my most "modern" AM2+

Systems.

The bad as first: On modern systems with win 7 64 and above, the chances to get

old things like the Janes or Microprose things running are very mixed at best.

There are a few patches (for Janes USAF, IAF for example) that can do the thing,

or you can use nGlide (the best wrapper I think) with some of the 3DFX Games, but

many of the old games won't run at all or so buggy you can't use them.

As I told I've collected sims for over 20 years now. So my collection is really

huge. If you knew migmans flightsim museum, I have all this stuff an alot more.

From old DOS sims like Falcon AT, Flight Of The Intruder to modern sims like

Falcon BMS or the DCS series. And not only combat and flight sims, but all kind

of sims. There are racing and car games, train sims, ship sims etc. About over

1000 sim games, filling more than 15 DJ-bags with slimline jewels. Call me crazy,

but simming is my life ;-)

So as you can see I have alot of stuff I could test what works and what doesn't.

For the last 2 years I've spent a lot of time to get the most "important" old

sims to run. A lot of stuff I have is just for emotional reasons, cause today

some things a really aged. You have those things in good memories, but if you

play it again ... that's the sim I must have at all costs 15 years ago ?!?

Jetfighter IV is such a thing. I bought it years ago, cause I love the good old

F-14 Tomcat. There weren't much Turkey sims out there a few years ago, before the

Thirdwire series. The only real sim was Fleetdefender but this was a Dos sim with

VGA Graphics. So I hoped JF IV is a bit of a sim. I don't had much time those

days for playing, so I put the CD in, fired it up and tested it for some minutes.

The graphics were o.k. and for real testing I had not the time. But now I see

it's truly more an action shooter than any kind of sim. So it goes today with

most of the so called sims.

But some of this old things a quite good today, cause graphics have never been the main issue

for a good simulation (Steel Beasts etc. for example). But if you really love

this old stuff and willing to spend a few bucks for your hobby, there is a way to

get most of this old beloved things running without any glitches or errors. Many

of those look quite better than in the originally days.

So this is what I've done: I have a relatively new system (AMD Phenom 1100T / 2x

680 GTX SLI / 16GB Ram), no monster machine, for my new sims like Thirdwire SFP2

Series, Falcon BMS or DCS. On this rig most of the new stuff runs really fluid

and it's not so expensive at all. But therefor I have another system, that runs

most of my sims (cause there haven't many new real sims hit the market after

around 2004) I have. Now the hardware specifications and the software I used to

get most sims running perfectly.

Hardware (you could get it for some bucks on ebay):

- ASRock K7VT6 Socket 462 Board
- AMD 3000+ Athlon XP FSB 400
- 1 GB Ram (2x512MB) PC3200 FSB 400
- Geforce FX 5900 128Mb AGP
- 2x Voodoo 2 Diamond Monster 12MB SLI
- MSTech PCI Audio Soundcard (cause the onboard one has trouble with some old

sims)
- 1GBit LAN card to have better performance in copying things to the rig as with

the onboard 100Mbit

Software (this was the real challange to get the right system setup with the

correct settings):

- Win ME (not 98SE which most people prefer, I tell about this later)
- Forceware 56.64 (Antialiasing 2x , Anisoptropic x4)
- 3DFX Voodoo 2 Driver Version 3.03 Beta Directx 7
- DirectX 9,0C
- nGlide 1.04 (runs flawlessly on WinME, believe me, I knew the sys spec says

min. XP)

So what I've done to get the sims running:

At first I had a third voodoo 1 card beside the two voodoo 2 in the system, for

running things like the
Frontline Fighters (Hind, Apache, F16 Digital Integration) in 3DFX. The reason

was that there is a bug only
in the Hind sim with the later released voodoo 2 patch. In the pit of the hind,

if you look on the hud there
is the altitude-arrow on the right radar-altitude-ladder missing. The glass of

the hud is altough missing.
The original 3DFX for voodoo 1 hasn't that bug. So I wanted to run the

Frontlinefighters with voodoo 1.

Unfortunately there is no way to get a voodoo 1 board running on a system with

more than 100FSB. I had to run
both voodoo systems perfectly beside each other on a Slot 1 Pentium III 1Ghz

System with the good old Intel BX440
chipset. You have to deal with the glide.dll and some other driver files off the

voodoos to make the two systems (voodoo 2 sli & voodoo 1 stand alone)

interchangeable, but the rest was running. Same thing about making the driver

files changeable comes later on with the system from above, to get voodoo 2

running besides nGlide.

The main drawback of this system was, that it wasn't powerfull enough to play the

later sims, that don't run on modern systems without any bugs, but nevertheless

need a relatively fast cpu and graphicboard for fluid simming.
So I had to think about a new way, if I don't want to have 15 computers for all

my sims to run . As most sims run with voodoo 2 or you could get patches for

those which won't, I desided to use a faster system and leave the voodoo 1 off.

There it comes the idea to use nGlide for sims having trouble with voodoo 2 sli.

nGlide uses DirectX 9.0C to interpret glide to D3D or OpenGL. So DirectX 9.0C is

no problem with WinMe I thought. XP is not very good for old sims, especially the

Janes series, so I want to stay with an 9X system. If nGlide runs on a 9X things

must be much easier I thought. And to my surprise nGlide runs flawlessly if not

much better on Win ME, cause no menu bugs appear any more, which was caused by

Direct Draw errors on modern systems. And the 462 system has enough power to run

the old 3DFX sims on higher resolutions with nGlide. Believe me, you never seen

Longbow Gold FX, Longbow 2, Janes F-15 or M1 Tank Platoon 2 in such a perfect,

bugfree, eyecandy version on high resolutions. It runs absolutely fluid, but not

to fast as with some newer systems. No broken menus couse of OS

incompatibilities. All is nearly perfect, if not perfect at all. Better than

those days back, you only could use 640x480 and had to dream of such a powerfull

PC running Win ME or 98SE.

So why ME and not 98SE? Cause ME isn't that bad you always been told. It has usb

compatibility out of the box. You may need this, cause of flightsicks, throttle,

rudder pedals or cockpit equipment you wan't to use with the old sims. Most you

have to retrofit to 98SE comes with ME out of the box. The memory tolerance is

much better than on win 98 se. 1GB Ram 400FSB is no problem. Set the agp aperture

size in the bios to 256Mb if you experience problems, thats it. No system.ini

edit, it runs. Longbow 2 for example runs without the 320Mb Patch using 1GB Ram.

End Part 1

part 2

So lets get to the point of the Forceware driver and the right Geforce card. I have alot of old Geforces lying around here. I've tested Geforce 2 TI, Geforce 3 TI 500, Geforce 4200 TI, Geforce 4600 TI, Geforce 5200 TI, Geforce 5900 and the biggest AGP Card, the Geforce 6800 GT. All under the Geforce 4000 series are to slow for a fluid gaming experience with nGlide. The 6800 GT with 512Mb and the Forceware 77.72 (the oldest you get a 6800 running with) makes a lot of problems. In Usaf the artificial horizon in vr pit (F4) disappears and some textures doesn't look right.

The 5900 with only 128Mb and the Forceware 56.64 runs perfectly on for all sims and has enough power for nGlide at the following settings: max. 2x Antialiasing / max. 4 Anisoptropic. More Antialiasing makes the intro movies change to a black screen. This happens in Janes USAF and IAF. Longbow Gold FX has no props, while in Longbow 2 the movies look a bit psychodelic . So I leave it at 2x Antialiasing, cause under nGlide with a res of 1280x1024 it looks amazing enough!

Now let's come to the big trick. For sims like Janes USAF you have to edit the inf-file in your Geforce driver. You must remove all "absurd" resolutions for old games. In case you have a widescreen, you must use the res that fit's best with it. In my case (I use an old 4:3 CRT or an 4:3 LCD) i leave the following resoulutions and delete all the other entries from the NV30 section of the inf-file: The setting I leave are 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. After that reinstall your driver with the modified settings. If you don't own USAF, you could leave this step. Usaf has a limitation of the max different res it could handle. This ends in not clickable 32bit res in the preferences menu.

Now comes the last tricky thing. You want to use nGlide for the best graphical look, but sometimes nGlide is not compatible with some games. The Novalogic sims F22 Lighting 3, F-16 Multirole ang Mig 29 Fulcrum are such ones. If you use nGlide with them, you have the nice high resolutions, but if you push the throttle forward and the plane begins to move, the 2D Cockpit begins to flicker. F22 anf F16 are more worse here than the Mig29.

So nGlide is no Option here. But we still have the voodoo 2 sli system. And the Novalogic sims run perfect with the SLi on 1024x768. The only trick is to get the nGlide drivers interchangeable with the voodoo 2 drivers on your system. At the begining I put all the drivers directly in the game directory, to bypass compatibility troubles. But sh... some games (Janes F-15 for example) search for voodoo drivers in the windows\system directory. If there are no driver, no voodoo can be selected.

So how could I get two version of voodoo drivers at same place, and have always the right ones activated? Renaming the files isn't an option. In this case you had to rewrite one of the drivers completely, to find the renamed dll, vxd etc.

I came around with this idea: First install your voodoo 2 system. Then go to windows\sytem. Now pack all these files (3DFXSPL2.DLL, 3DFXSPL3.DLL, FXMEMMAP.VXD, GLIDE2X.DLL and GLIDE3X.DLL) to a selfextracting ZIP and call it 3DF.exe for example. Use windows\system path for extracting features. Now install nGlide. Make the same with the following nGlide files (3DFXSPL.DLL, 3DFXSPL2.DLL, 3DFXSPL3.DLL, GLIDE.DLL GLIDE2X.DLL and GLIDE3X.DLL)and call it nGlide.exe. Now put the file FXMEMMAP.VXD from the 3DFX.exe to the nGlide.exe. This has no real function, but if this file isn't in the windows\system folder, some games like F-15 once again, thinks there is no 3DFX card in the system and you don't have the option to choose one, no matter you wan't to use nGlide.

Now make another file. Simple textfile in this case. Put the following in:

@echo off
C:
cd \windows\system
del 3DFXSPL.DLL
del 3DFXSPL2.DLL
del 3DFXSPL3.DLL
del FXMEMMAP.VXD
del GLIDE.DLL
del GLIDE2X.DLL
del GLIDE3X.DLL

after editing rename the file to DelVoodoo.bat for example.

Now you have 3 files you could start. The 3dfx.exe if you want to use your voodoo 2 hardware, the nglide.exe
if your sim supports nGlide wrapper and the delvoodoo.bat to get a clean system for the sims that use D3D DirectX.

The 3dfx tab in the desktop graphic setting dissapears if you delete the 3dfx dll and vxd files in your
windows\system folder. But don't panic, the driver is still there. When you use the 3dfx.exe file to unpack
the driver files in the system dir, viola the 3dfx magically appears back.

One thing about ME. You could use all usb cockpit hardware up to 32buttons and 8 axis. But most of the drivers
written for newer systems will not function. Only DirectX support here. But in most cases this is enough for the old sims. My cockpit runs many things via keyboard macros (yes I have the old TM FLCS TQS WCS - QUickshot Masterpilots etc.) running. I have another old rig running a AMD K6 500 @ 300Mhz with 66FSB so I'm able to program these old masterpiece of flightsinm hardware. Once programmend they run like a charm on modern systems. No need for HOTAS Warthog (have an old Suncom FS with a Talon Stick and changed it to FLCS TQS PCB's). I love this old Flightware. O.K. a Warthog and a used Cougar will be the next things in my Home Base. But before I could buy some, I have to speak with my "Major"

P.S: I missed something in the post about making the voodoo self executeable archives. You have to told your packer, that the self executable should overwrite all files in the target directory without prompting! This is the way the switching works!

Nice to know you! Welcome here !

Weird spacing makes reading a bit confusing but nice write up!

Hi,

many thanks for your reply. My Laptop had a BSOD. But I had copied everthing to a text file. After copying back the spaces appeared.

Many other literal errors happend. Excuse me, but no sleep for the last two days. Had to do cockpit-work .

Now I'm really being tired out.

Ha think what,

I could not sleep at all. Feel like on steroids . Must think about new ideas for building my pit the whole night. No wonder after 20 years of flightsim deprivation

I've seen that there are a lot of missing letters in my last posts. Excuse me for that. I think I need to fix my laptop soon cause some of the keys do not work correctly anymore. I'm a computer scientist but never learned
to typewrite. So if I write a text I always look at the keys and not the screen. So sometimes, specially if my brain works to fast for my writing, #%&*$# things happen .

I hope I could give some of you, that love simming the way I do, some help to get old good things running again. Unfortunately this genre is going down more and more, cause no one is willing to read 300 pages of a manual anymore to get a plane starting. Today it must be eyecandy with alot of unrealistic action. The good old sim days have gone. There is only DCS, Thirdwire SFP2 and Falcon BMS (now since a few days in version 4.33!!!) at the moment for modern combat flight sim. The other two modern combat sims are Steel Beasts Pro PE and EECH All Mods. If you call ARMA a kind of sim we have one more. That's all for years now.

Sad, cause with the systems we have today, incredibly things would be possible. Not only eyecandy but real battlefields with air, land , sea operations all together. But since the younger once love cellphone apps more than computer games, I think this genre will gonna die. Thirdwire makes cellphone apps out of their products instead of releasing some new stuff. What a shame! My own son hasn't the patience for real sims with reading manuals. All must go fast and without many thinking.

This is why I make my old rig and play most of the good old stuff.

Regards Sven

I kinda cheated.

Restored one of my older Socket 7 AMD K6-2 Systems.

everything worked flawlessly,had a lil trouble with the voodoo 3 pci card, but after some contact and slot cleaning all worked fine.

I also have a few older systems that would do better, but For MSDos/Early Windows games, this one does fine.

Im working on converting / cloning the drives to vhd format, and seeing if the games will boot in virtual machine modes.

my Professional Virtual Machine software has ability to emulate Voodoo2 acceleration, and Id also be able to forward USB input and use Plugins to configure them as emulated gameport devices.

Novalogic F-22 Lightning 3, I didn't remember this game supporting Glide, I've always used DirectX(6?). F16 Multirole Fighter is older and doesn't support DirectX graphics but F-22 looks good to me at 1024x768. Or were you just trying for higher resolutions with a Glide wrapper?

Maybe that's because the hardcore flight simmer niche mostly consists of guys over the age of 35 who now have jobs and families and thus don't have the time to read a 300 page manual?

What happened is that the hardcore flight sim niche failed to acquire NEW fans. I don't know anyone under the age of 25 who flies high fidelity flight sims.

Speaking of age (48)...

I find that in Falcon 4: Allied Force (for example) that I'm no longer able to see the 1600x1200 pit clearly anymore on my 19" CRT, now looking through progressive trifocals (wearing glasses since 2nd grade). Also not as sharp as it use to be at 1280x1024 native on my 19" LCD. I can still read most small print when I take off my glasses, but the really small stuff is fuzzy now.

I could probably solve this with a bigger screen but I have enough lower-res games to play (and create) that are also easier on the brain (I play games for down time) so I just accept that I'm slowing down and my tastes are changing.

Mark brings up some excellent points. Research has shown that our cognitive abilities and attention span are at their peak during our teen years and our 20's. It starts to decline in your 30's. This might explain why many older gamers have actually gone to playing simpler flight sims where you can just take off, fly and fight with minimal time investment.

So I had tested a lot the last days (weeks). At the moment I'm running an AM2+ System with Geforce 5900 Ultra on winMe respectively Win98SE. At the moment it seems this rig is running really good other than a few video problems with the movie files of Longbow Anthology. It's a driver problem with the Forceware's. Sadly there are only a few drivers available that can run the FX5900 on Win9X (51 to 77 Versions / 81 crashes on installation).

The Geforce 6800 is the highest you can go with on Win9x. Unfortunately NVidia desided to drop the support of 8-bit palleted textures with the Geforce 6800 series, so the latest you can go with is the 6600 series.
I only have one 6600 and this one is really sh... I's an Axle card and much slower than the 5900 Ultra. Bessides that facts, the card's capacitors burst. I've soldered new better ones and once again "PLOP". Something other must be wrong here. But I was not in the mood to follow that more.

So why such a relatively modern sys for running old games? Cause I wan't to run my sims from the Longbow age to the time of Falcon Allied Force on one rig. My other highend rig's power consumption is about 550-600W. That's a lot. Here in Germany the electricity tariff is really absurd. Therefore I only want to play the highend sims like Falcon BMS 4.33, DCS or the FSX on it. The other stuff should run on this rig. And I don't want another PC for retro simming. At the moment I have three systems running. One really old only for programming the old hardware (FLCS, TQS, Quickshot Masterpilots etc.), one for the older sims and one for the highend eyecandy things.

If the new AM2+ Sys runs fine without any bugs, I will report it. So other crazy freaks have a little help and don't have to waste so much time in testing.

Regards Sven

P.S: The above referes to AGP only. There are a few moded driver for PCIe. I've tested a lot, but the only really stable on Win9X is to use AGP graphic cards. So you need an AM2+ AGP-Board. Mine is a ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA, cause you could get busmaster drivers for Win9X (nForce3 250 4.27 driver). I've tested the PCIe thing with a ASRock ALiveDual-eSATA2 that uses the same chipset besides NVIDIA M1695 Chipset for PCIe support. The board runs fine with 9X, but most games don't like PCIe. You could run this board with AGP too, but the ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA seems a bit more stable while simming.

The hardware of my first post runs really fine, but I wanted a bit more, so I decided to test an AM2+ Sys at next.